[RFC] Delegate Tokens from the DAO treasury to performinng delegates

Summary

Kickstarting a conversation around increasing voting token supply and mitigating threats posed by governance attacks by delegating tokens from the DAO treasury to performing delegates.

Motivation

Out of the 200M circulating supply of SHU tokens, on average less than 40M tokens participate in DAO governance. Many top delegates with considerable voting power have less than 50% vote participation rate, and some even as low as 10% or 0%. A potential attacker must acquire just over 40M tokens, currently worth less than 1M, to raid 5M in stables in the treasury. This is a significant concern given that participation in DAO governance is slowly declining. On the other hand, several delegates with over 80% voting participation actively participate in discourse regularly.

Proactive delegates have significant voting power in healthy governance environments, they ensure that malicious votes are prevented, and quorum requirements are met. To mitigate the risk of attack and empower value-aligned delegates, we suggest delegating a small portion of the 500M SHU tokens sitting in the treasury to active, value-aligned delegates.

Specification:

Criteria for eligibility:

  • Must have voted on 60% (or more) of proposals (minus the proposals that were cancelled) over the last three months (as of the date when this proposal is passed on Snapshot).
  • Must have actively participated in proposal voting for more than three months and have a Delegate Platform on ShutterDAO Forum.

Application Criteria

  • Meets the above Requirements
  • Voting Power is less than 5 million SHU (as of the date when this proposal is passed on Snapshot).

Delegation Specification:

  • Following the example of UniswapDAO, which has used franchiser contracts for such activity, we suggest using this same contract to delegate tokens from the treasury.
  • We suggest delegating 100M SHU tokens from the treasury, split equally among all eligible delegates for a period of 1 year. This amount will ensure that a potential attacker cannot gather sufficient tokens from the open market to gain majority voting power in the DAO.
  • If this proposal is approved, DAOplomats will create an application thread, which will be live for two weeks. We will filter out delegates who do not meet the criteria and create a proposal to delegate 100M SHU equally to all eligible delegates.
  • As compensation for deploying the contracts and facilitating the process, we request 50,000 SHU tokens.

Next Steps

  • Gather feedback from the DAO.